Chef Michelle Harris was back in her hometown of Manchester recently, but she didn't stay long. There were too many opportunities "cooking" on the west coast.

After a brief visit with family and friends in Clay County, Michelle, 25, returned to California to put the training she got at the Advanced Culinary Academy at San Francisco's Treasure Island Job Corps Center to good use.

Michelle has been offered a position with a large catering company located at the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center, which hosts the city's renowned symphony orchestra and theater and opera productions. She said she also might pursue part-time work at a bakery in the city owned by a friend.

The sky truly is the limit since Michelle began her trek toward a bright future by enrolling in the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) Youth Program at the Clay County JobSight workforce center in Manchester in 2001.

"The WIA has and always will open doors for me," she said.

According to Michelle, the most important door WIA opened for her was providing access to culinary training through Job Corps, a partner program in the JobSight network administered by the Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program, Inc. (EKCEP), which also administers WIA programs in 23 eastern Kentucky counties.

Excelling in the local Job Corps culinary training got Michelle accepted into the prestigious academy at the Treasure Island Job Corps Center. After training for more than a year and a half to become a professional fine-dining chef, Michelle graduated from the academy on August 28, along with other top students who came there from numerous local Job Corps centers across the nation.

However, her finals didn't involve the usual multiple-choice and essay-question classroom exams, Michelle said. Instead, she earned her graduation by passing a grueling cooking and restaurant management trial, in which she did everything that a head chef at an actual fine-dining restaurant would do to produce a five-star dining experience for a group of 13 people.

The group of 13 diners included three of the academy's top chefs, who evaluated her decisions, and graded her cooking efforts based on taste, texture, and presentation, Michelle said.

"It was essentially like building a restaurant from top to bottom," she said. "We had to pick our front- and back-of-house chefs and staff, put together our menu, price the food, and do a cost inventory. It was way more than just cooking."

Michelle's signature meal included southern spoon bread; stuffed mushrooms with smoked gouda, caramelized onions, Asiago cheese, and tomato concasse; cream of potato soup with country cured ham, bleu cheese, and chives; braised Cornish game hens with house-made bourbon sauce; fingerling potatoes tossed with a sun-dried tomato vinaigrette and green beans; and mini upside-down cheesecake with a strawberry mint bourbon compote.

Michelle said that meal and the way she ran the kitchen impressed the academy's chefs so much that she earned an "A" on the event and graduated from the academy.

"I've learned how to cook, and I learned something new every day," she said. "By learning the art of presentation, you can take just about any food and make it look presentable. You eat with your eyes and not just your stomach, so if food doesn't look good, you're not going to eat it."

Michelle credits Job Corps with more than just teaching her how to cook like a professional chef. She said her participation in culinary programs, first at the Pine Knot Job Corps Center in McCreary County and later in San Francisco, helped her "grow up."

"I see things differently now, and everybody in my family can see the change," Michelle said. "Going from Manchester to almost 3,500 miles away from home will do that to you."

Making that jump would have been impossible without the WIA Youth Program bridging her dream of becoming a chef with the future she is now prepared to enter, she said.

Michelle completed two years in the WIA Youth Program in June 2003. The WIA Youth Program provides a broad array of services including: tutoring, study skills, leadership development, mentoring, guidance and counseling. The program also places teens and young adults in both public and private-sector work experience jobs that match their interests and teach career skills. The program is administered and funded by the Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program, Inc. (EKCEP), and operated locally through the Daniel Boone Development Council at the Clay County JobSight in Manchester.

In early 2004, she took the advice of her WIA Career Adviser Lynne House and began pursing culinary arts training through Job Corps, a partner program in the JobSight network that provides residential and non-residential vocational and educational training programs for young adults between the ages of 16 and 24.

"The minute I saw that program, I knew it would be a perfect fit for Michelle if she would just do it," Lynne said. "It was everything she had been looking for. I knew that if she would try it, she would like it and succeed."

Michelle feels she has succeeded, to the extent that the story of her success-publicized in a WIA Success Story press release produced by EKCEP-sometimes precedes her these days. She first found evidence of this during a visit to the Pine Knot Job Corps Center shortly after she graduated. (Click here to read Michelle's full Success Story.)

"They told me a student from Manchester is there now who read my Success Story in the newspaper before he started, and now he's in their culinary arts program and has applied to go to Treasure Island, too," Michelle said with a smile. "It really shocked me when they told me that, but it feels pretty good to know that I inspired somebody."

For additional information on the WIA Youth Program at the Clay County JobSight, contact Terrina Frazier at 606-598-5127.